A Romance with Travel: The Night In Florence

Sometimes I decide I am through, forever through, with travel.

I had spent a beautiful weekend in Rome with someone I had left behind in England. The cost of travel was seeming pretty high. (And au pairing had mostly brought cleaning up food and soil and oil and having plates thrown at my head.) So after three delayed trains in a row, I ended up stuck in Florence for the night.

I know, it sounds like a good thing. But not after Rome, not after seeing him again.

Wandering out of the station with the intention of finding a hostel, I bumped into this guy. Well, he stopped me asking where he should go next. Then said, 'wow, you have such presence.' At which point I was already thinking, ‘will you just fuck off? I’m heart broken.’

When I asked him how old he was he said 17000 because I live every day as if it’s ten years. I asked him again and he said 3, because I never stop asking questions and the world is new. I said will you get to the fucking point, and he said 19. 

Pretty much the same thing with asking him his name:‘I don’t believe in names as they tie you to an identity’. 

He also made his own clothes as he thought we should express ourselves more freely. It was some kind of long dress that had an elegance and looked quite Eastern, as well as filthy and in desperate need of a wash. He also had shoes that were too big, and I might have thought he was homeless, except that he had a macbook pro.

He’d come to ‘Italia’ (I’m pretty sure ‘si’ and ‘Italia’ were his only Italian so he insisted upon using them constantly) to get a pen handmade by someone who promised to do it if he wrote an important essay with it.

He said one and only one interesting thing: Apparently ants use significantly more energy than we do (20 times more?) and yet they have no damaging impact. His explanation: clearly the Fourth Dimension. He then went on to write in reverse to show me the new 4D language he was forming.

So, I ended up wandering through Florence at night with him.

Him and a Portuguese guy who we met when he stopped us in the rain by saying, ‘Look! That’s where the cloud stops! I’ve always wondered where that happens…’

The Portuguese guy actually seemed fairly down to earth, minus his really annoying question to nameless guy: ‘So you like philosophy; does that mean you smoke weed?’

And there was a girl from Rome. The Portuguese guy's temporary girlfriend. They would break up when he went to Venice.

So the four of us went to ponte vecchio at night, and there were the padlocks. I don’t care what other people say. I think they’re cute. Each of them is where someone has said to someone else, ‘I care’. And that’s beautiful. 

It was pretty but I was trying to get back home after my Roman adventure. I’d done Florence another time, my head was spinning from the guy I'd left to travel, and I just wanted today to be yesterday so it could be a little less raw.

And there was Roman Girl blabbing on about, ‘where chance meets chance… destiny is at the crossroads’ meanwhile Too Much of a Twat for a Name Guy was sounding like he was being laid. ‘Oh yeah! Oh wow! Ahhhhhh! Where chance meets chance!’

Around 4, through the rain, I made it back to the train station. No Name still following. He took it up again, despite my insistent and explicit Not Interesteds.

‘Am I not courageous enough for you?’

Well, I've never been asked that before.

I got the train and had all of half an hour's sleep before going straight to another day of 4 crazy Italian boys.

And still, I didn't break up with travel.

Fly Down to Mexico

20/12/11: All is not going to plan. It just so happens, to my surprise, that in Mexico, they speak Spanish. I tell people I love their laxative instead of their accent (an easy mistake to make). They tell me to stop molesting them. At first horrified, I search through my dictionary and find reassurance that I’m not about to be processed by the Mexican legal system for sexual harassment. This comes as a relief to someone who is tired after having spent last night in Orlando’s airport terminal trying to speak Spanish to a young woman from Columbia as she tried to convert me to Mormonism. She then hid beneath her jumper with her bible as the cleaner proudly informed me that McDonald’s stays open until 3am. Phew.

22/12/11: After having come close to calling my mummy to drop by and pick me up, things take an upward turn. Yesterday I cycled through a jungle looking at Maya ruins and at last managed to get out some cash. So I can now eat. I write this from a beautiful old building still being decorated; I had tequila with grapefruit on the way over, walking past the sea. I compose an ode to morning alcoholism. I’m where I want to be.

25/12/11: Apparently jelly is a typical Christmas desert. I ate it last night with my makeshift family that had come together on the beaches of Progreso (swimming not recommended, barbecues for a recently retired vegetarian, highly recommended). After our Christmas jelly, we went out to dance along the streets. There was an Italian who spoke to me in Spanish and at last I understood. The language made sense. I could speak it. But more importantly, I discovered something better than tacos: banana dipped in nutella. Warning: for the unsuspecting consumer, infatuation with the chef is a likely side effect.

26/12/11: I need to plan where I’m going, where I’m turning back, what I need to see. I want to swim in a cenote. I want to go to the ruins on the rocks of Tulum.

28/12/11: The year is nearly at a close…what have I learnt? Two kinds of doors, two kinds of paths…two ways to look at a situation.

View Over San Cristobel

30/12/11: I’m on the bus to San Cristobel. I stopped writing the last entry when my hammock neighbours said hello and then yet again my world changed. Especially after the mushroom tea. A voice of wisdom told me ‘Be where you need to be and you’ll meet who you need to meet’ as the burning logs began to move and the shadows became snakes. The day after I swam beneath a waterfall and spoke to a Mexican about health care and education and crime. He wanted to live in Mexico. And I’d let myself be fooled into thinking they were all desperate to cross the border anyway possible to reach the Promised Land.

3/01/12: First entry of the new year, being written on an 18 hour bus journey. No toilet on board. I plan my life. Someone behind me throws up. I pick apart what I’ve learnt and how I can be the person I want to be. I try to grasp the moments I left in the last place. I realise I keep writing in the in-between moments. I’m not capturing the moments themselves. They have to be lived.

04/01/12: In white sands, turquoise waters and coconut trees beach paradise, and I want to be elsewhere. Last night I slept in a hammock, freezing cold as I wrapped myself in dirty, sweaty clothes after having been chased along the road by a Mexican man on a bicycle with a hole in the crotch of his jeans shouting ‘Quieres novio?’ (want a boyfriend?)  

05/01/12: Perhaps the cold last night weakened my immune system. I appear to have been struck by a severe case of travel snobbery. Symptoms presenting include: thinking that somewhere is too touristy (hey, I’m not a tourist, I’m a traveller), and inwardly tutting every time someone gets out their camera (still bitter that I lost mine). I decide my Spanish is suffering, as I ignore everyone around me, and resolve to return to Merida.

08/01/12: Last day in Mexico. On the bus here I was told about a man who started out with a red paper clip and made one trade at a time until he ended up with an island. Now I’m back in the town where I began. I feel I should have something profound to say about Mexico. About how the journey along side streets to the Zapatista university with mud walls, or the strange church with no pews where they drank coca cola to cleanse their souls, or the cenotes where tree routes and sunlight fall down through holes into caves of electric blue water whose light reflects off rocks, left some deep impression. But I can’t make anything coherent.

Its beauty isn’t a clean, straight forward one. There’s a lot of mess and car fumes. But there’s the beauty you stumble across– the court yards, and the places where the disorder gives birth to something.

The colonial buildings and Maya ruins and cheap new buildings with palm trees surrounding them and loud music blasting out from tacky clothes shops and the mountain views of San Cristobel and the thrill of dancing salsa and the deep poverty and a large middle class and in some ways it’s not all so different from the States except for I felt freer here and less of a need to prove myself through success and more of a need to learn from, build upon, value and get to grip with the relationships I form.

14/01/12: On return I confess to a friend that I carelessly lost my camera near the beginning and spent too much time making out with Joses (well, two – one of them had a moustache and some hot salsa moves) or chasing Italians, when I should have been getting to know the culture. He wisely assures me: there are many ways to get to know people. One of them is with your mouth.